Film

  • Check out my book “Worldly Desires: Cosmopolitanism and Cinema in Hong Kong and Taiwan”

    Over a decade in the making, my book Worldly Desires: Cosmopolitanism and Cinema in Hong Kong and Taiwan is now available from Edinburgh University Press. The book examines the role that cinema played in imagining Hong Kong and Taiwan’s place in the world from the 1950s to the early 2000s. Here’s the official book jacket

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  • Cinema Little Saigon: A Retrospective

    In 2015, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, I curated a retrospective of films directed by Vietnamese Americans. The hope was to steer commemorations away from narratives of American military heroism and toward the experiences of those who experienced, critiqued, and remembered the event and its after-effects as refugees

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  • Drive-By Cinema

    Drive-By Cinema

    Back when I first started at Pacific Arts Movement, then-Executive Director Lee Ann Kim would laugh recalling how the former Associate Festival Director George Lin used to joke about buying a mail truck and driving it around San Diego projecting films. Lee Ann just wanted to highlight George’s madcap ways. I, on the hand, steeped

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  • Roger and Me

    Roger and Me

    This appreciation was written the afternoon after Roger Ebert passed away. To this date, it’s one of the most personal and autobiographical essays I’ve written. I was moved by how widely shared it was, and it remains one of the most viewed posts ever on the Pacific Arts Movement website, where it was first published.

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  • Watching Golden Slumbers at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival

    This was a blog post I did for the SDAFF website in 2012, but it disappeared during one of our many website migrations. Long Beach’s Art Theatre is 12 miles from my childhood home in Cerritos, California. That makes the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival’s three days of screenings there my closest film festival

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